Yesterday at the local grocery store, I met a guy named Taylor and realized after a minor delay that he was none other than the famous-for-education teacher/poet Taylor Mali.

I accosted him, made him take a selfie with me, and got a quick update on his news. This past Fall, Mali raffled off the original version of his poem to raise funds for a favorite charity. What poem, you ask? You must be new here.

Way back in 2005, Mali's slam performance, riffing off of "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach," was an early viral hit -- and could be considered part of an early wave of teacher voices angry at longtime denigration by the public and policymakers.

See one of many versions of the performance here. See a critic's takedown of his work here.

Here's a roundup of the Top 20 Education Next Articles of 2015 from Education Next, a magazine I've written for a few times over the years. Topics addressed include poverty, Success Academy, Common Core, AltSchools (of course!), Detroit, English Language Learners.

In a perfect world, other education outlets -- Education Week, Chalkbeat, Hechinger Report, the Atlantic Education Page, Vox -- would do the same with their best or top-read pieces. But I don't think most do -- at least not yet.

As you may recall, the Gates Education Forum/15th Year Anniversary begins today with an address from Bill Gates and some other speeches and announcements.

The Twitter handle to follow is @gatesED, which is also the hashtag #GatesEd. You can see an unofficial list of speakers and moderators here. I saw Ted Mitchell on the attendees list, but no John King. Let's assume he's staying put in DC given recent events.

It seems hard to believe, but I'm told that this is the first big education-focused event that the foundation has done since 2008, when it shifted gears away from its early focus on smaller high schools and other things towards teacher development and high school and college completion.

I'll be moderating a panel on "unlikely allies" tomorrow morning featuring two pairs of folks who found ways to work together rather than lapsing into finger-pointing, etc.

Here's the livestream from #NOLAed conference going on now. Or click here if the link doesn't work -- I couldn't find real embed codes. The schedule for the day is here. Or watch PBS NewsHour's Gwen Ifil deliver a Newark commencement speech here.

Just in case anyone's feeling a momentary lack of urgency (or has delusions of immortality), it's worth remembering that 1990s education all-star Gaynor McCown died nearly a decade ago, at 45 -- and that she's probably not as well-remembered as she should be.

Wages for education (and health services) workers went up just 1.9 percent over the past year, less than the national average. Why's that? "Low-wage workers are earning more. Leisure and hospitality employees, mainly restaurant workers, saw a 3.6% hourly pay increase over the past year.... Higher-skilled workers are also doing well.... Several big employment sectors [including education] are being left out of better pay." Via WSJ (Why Are Wages Growing Slowly Despite McDonald’s, Wal-Mart Raises?)

Social media is great, and we all know how to set up streams on Hootsuite or Tweetdeck and use hashtags and check for updates constantly and all the rest, but it's still been hard to figure out where the conversation is going without spending all day watching Twitter, right?

Until now, that is. A newish program called Nuzzel (tag line: "News from your friends") watches social media for you and lets you know when a bunch of your "friends" are going crazy over something.

When a story like this one gets big, you get an alert and then you can click down and see who (among your friends) got the ball rolling and how it unfolded. In this case, it was @maggieNYT who quad-tweeted her story out at noon, followed by Bloomberg's Jennifer Epstein, Gotham Gazette's Ben Max, and Politico's Caitlin Emma.

Or at least, that's how it appears on my Nuzzel - perhaps you have more or better friends than I do.

But wait, there's more! Nuzzel lets you get a daily email, plus individual alerts at a threshold level of activity you can determine. You can synchronize Twitter, Facebook, and other social media accounts. You can even subscribe to custom feeds, (aka Twitter lists, whose usefulness has always been limited to vanity), and get alerts that way.

Basically, Nuzzel is a way to tame Twitter. It basically tells you what's trending within the group of folks you already know and love (or at least follow) that's not reliant on hashtags, saved streams, or Twitter's lame Trending lists.

It may not yet be a full replacement for Feedly (or for having your own social media manager pinging you in the Bahamas when something comes up), but it's a big step forward.

And, it's a big argument for following or friending folks who don't agree with you already because it makes the echo chamber pretty obvious. Don't follow your opponents or others and you won't know what they're excited or upset about.

Big thanks to JGW for tipping me off about it.Click below for some screenshots if it's still not making sense.

This year's Yale SOM Education Leadership Conference could be particularly interesting, given where were are in the education debate. It looks like there are going to be some new faces and names -- Kalimah Priforce, anyone? The theme ("Back to Why") andofficial goal (to refocus on "the purpose and outcomes of education reform") are full of intrigue to people like me who follow these things too closely. We all know that the fight for the hearts and minds of smart young do-gooder types (and entrepreneurs, etc.) is pretty heated, as is the rhetorical battle over who's more "social justice." Website. Facebook.For past events, look at the list here. Previous blog posts from me about the event here.

It's hard to find a more useful, far-ranging, and long-running blog than the one California teacher Larry Ferlazzo has been running the last eight years. And so its easy for me to wish him a hearty Eighth Anniversary (just a few weeks late!).

What makes Larry's work so notable is that he shares and collects so prodigiously, and his work isn't anywhere near as narcissistic as most of us online tend to be. Some example blog posts include: New Resources On Race & Racism. Or let Larry tell you: What Have Been My Most Popular Posts? His personal favorites are here, As you will see, Ferlazzo's work spans classrooms and courthouses.

You will meet this schlumpy lifer who five minutes into the conference makes you just feel like killing yourself, and you think, ‘I leave my child with this kid?’ And the next person you meet will be this incredibly charismatic person who sees every young person before them as this unique piece of clay about to be molded.

From NBC News: "Missouri police seek a former elementary school principal, they now believe was running a heroin trafficking ring. " Click here if the video doesn't load properly. Or watch AFT video of UTLA event last week here, or Scott Walker's critique of going to college as a requirement for being President here, or Fordham's lavender-shirted Petrilli talking about the same topic over the weekend here.

One of the nice things about having been writing about education so long is that I now get to participate in #TBT (Throwback Thursday), through which the Internet celebrates (or laments) the past. This week's entry is a 2006 blog post about Anya Kamenetz, now NPR's lead education blogger and author of the exquisitely well-timed new book, The Test.Titled Another Great(?) Education Writer I've Never Heard Of, the post dates back to Blogspot days (before EdWeek, before Scholastic).

In this "how to make the case for education reform" video, the president of AEI tells his audience something that pretty much everyone in education advocacy has come to understand at this point, whatever side they're on: "You better make it moral, you better fight for people, and you better do it quick."

Watch it, tell us what you think (it's very much of the mind that reform ideas are fine they just haven't been communicated effectively), and extra points for calling out names from the audience reaction shots.

The EWA Education Writing Awards are great but include only folks who submit themselves to the process and so often miss out on non-education publications or articles that are about education but not not directly so. As a result, it's helpful to take a look at lists like this one from The Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf (Slightly More Than 100 Fantastic Pieces of Journalism), which includes some pieces I'd never seen before as well as a bunch of articles I've shared already:

"He was named the prom king, the most likely to succeed, the senior class salutatorian. He was accepted to UC Berkeley, one of the nation's most renowned public universities. A semester later, Kashawn Campbell sat inside a cramped room on a dorm floor that Cal reserves for black students. It was early January, and he stared nervously at his first college transcript. There wasn't much good to see."

"On days like this, even aloof kids displayed uncharacteristic kindness and affection. Boys lingered over handshakes and looked into my eyes solemnly. Girls threw their arms around me and wordlessly moved away. No one said enough."

There was no big news made at #EWA14. No loud arguments, or big deals (other than the announcement that the next conference will be at the UofC). That's why we were all Tweeting about cakepops and other diversions. But there were still a bunch of tidbits to be noted about the state of education media and the people who provide it:

4. The rise of the nonprofit news outlets. Chalkbeat rolled deep with a rumored 21 staffers in attendance, but there were also lots of other nonprofiteers in attendance (EdWeek, EdSource Today, SCPR/KPCC, Hechinger, etc.) In comparison, there was just a single NYT and LA Times reporter there,* and but a handful of AP reporters. (There are other reasons they don't feel the need to attend, but still...)

3. Changing of the guard (from journalism to other pursuits). Banchero is out. McNeil is out. Turner is out (a year ago). Others are but a memory. They say they're sad but also look a little relieved. It feels like there may be more moves out of journalism (as well as between outlets) to come.

2. Notable outsiders/new faces in attendance included Nikole Hannah-Jones from ProPublica (who had some things to say about attendance zone "gerrymandering" that might make progressives reconsider their defense of neighborhood schools), the new communications team from College Board (fresh off their big SAT rollout success), Xian Barrett and Anthony Cody (teacher advocate/activists who've attended on and off for the past couple of years) but no Ray Salazar, alas.

1. Soft interviews with Weingarten and Duncan. All due respect to the Washington Post's Layton and NPR's Drummond, but their interviews lacked the friendly but tough questions and followups that I recall John Merrow and others (Jay Mathews?) providing at past events when public officials rambled through their usual talking points. It wasn't just me who thought so -- lots of grumbling from the back rows (though not on Twitter - cowards!).

What'd I miss or get wrong? When do we get to see or hear the panels we missed? Did everyone get home safely and easily?

*EWA's Caroline Hendrie tells me that there were two other LAT reporters there -- Stephen Cesar and Larry Gordon.

Look carefully and you'll see that the pink color that predominates the map of US states' low-income grad rate image is broken up by just three orange states (NE, IO [should be IA, right?], and TN, according to this #edgif from PolicyMic (There's Some Really Good News About the State of Education). What those three states are doing differently, if anything, I have no idea.

Some fascinating reads from over the long MLK weekend, including a bunch of stuff about politics, advocacy, and over-reaching, a smattering of pieces about parenting and teaching, and the usual edtech trends and troubles:

This recent New Yorker cover, titled "All Together Now," reminds us in a new way that parents are mostly in schools for their own individual children rather than for the collective good of the school or everyone else's kids. There are many exceptions, of course, and parents aren't any worse than the rest of us in terms of altruism (better, probably). Also in this issue is a Talk of the Town about the chicken club a student wants to start at a tony private school called Avenues.

I know it's sort of a pain but you should really also be following me on Twitter (@alexanderrusso) and Facebook. Just in case you haven't gotten to that yet, here are some of the best things from over the weekend:

Also: Thanks to everyone who told me that my "From Jay Mathews" tweets -- my long-running effort to make sure his stuff makes it into social media -- had been flipped with Valerie Strauss's posts. I'm working on getting the feeds sorted out.

I'm a sucker for insider accounts by folks who aren't entirely comfortable with what they've been doing, so you can guess that my favorite story from the weekend was the McSweeny's pice written by a test prep tutor (bold below). What was yours?

Birth order and school performance: First-borns do better in school because parents discipline them more.ht.ly/qrVAQ

The evolution of backpack cool over the ages, from one strapping to two ht.ly/qrV7y Slate via @ForrestW

Over the weekend I try and check out magazines and other long-form sites for education-related coverage that I don't get to during the week and share them via Twitter. Here are some of the best from this past weekend:

The national education story of the week isn't the shutdown or the charter protests in NYC or anything else going on out East but rather the drama surrounding the much-delayed, much-weakened California law to speed the removal of sexual predators in the classroom that now awaits Governor Brown's decision.

How about someone asking Randi Weingarten, Dennis Van Roekel, or Arne Duncan what their positions are on the legislation -- or whether they're going to intervene (as they seem willing to do in many other state and local issues)? How about StudentsFirst, Stand for Children (happy birthday, Jonah!) and DFER getting more active on the issue and letting lawmakers including Brown know that they're being watched.

Thanks to everyone who's been reading (& retweeting) my Slate explainer about the Common Core controversy, which got it (momentarily) onto the front page. Read it here if you haven't already -- tell me what I left out or got wrong.

You should really be working all weekend (and following me on Twitter @alexanderrusso) but just in case you've got better things to do here are some stories from Friday-Sunday you might find useful to know about:

Is It Worthy? How to Judge the Value of a Tech Product | MindShift ow.ly/mij2e